Press & Data
Who Pays the Repair? is an independent, source-verified research database. Our data is free to cite and republish with attribution and a link to whopaystherepair.com.
Story angles
- The number most homeowners get wrong: across the US cities we verified, about six in ten put sidewalk repair on the property owner even though the sidewalk is public, and in most cities the homeowner owns the sewer lateral all the way to the main, a $5,000–$15,000 surprise.
- Same state, opposite rules: Austin and San Antonio draw the sewer-lateral boundary in opposite places; a few cities (Austin, Denver, Louisville, Tampa) took sidewalk repair off owners entirely while their neighbors did not.
- All 50 state statutes, read verbatim: from Oklahoma's 3-day emergency repair clock to New Hampshire's "the city pays" statute to the two states that never wrote a sidewalk law at all.
Download the data
Machine-readable, spreadsheet-ready, updated as records are added:
- data.csv: every published record, one row each, with the primary-source link
- data.json: the same data for developers
Embed the lookup on your site
Drop this into any article or resource page. Readers type their city and get the verified answer, cited to that city's own code, and it updates itself as we add cities. Free to use; the credit link back to us is built in.
<iframe src="https://whopaystherepair.com/embed/" width="100%" height="440" style="border:0;max-width:560px" title="Who pays for the repair? city lookup" loading="lazy"></iframe>Press contact
Werner Santos, publisher and editor: [email protected]. Ask for a city, a state, a topic or the full data set.
How to cite
"[Page title]," Who Pays the Repair?, whopaystherepair.com (accessed [date]). A link to whopaystherepair.com satisfies the attribution requirement.
Why you can trust it
Every published claim is independently re-fetched and quote-checked before it goes live (see our methodology), and a missing number is always preferred over a fabricated one. Records that cannot be verified are held, not guessed.
Using a specific cut
Need a slice we have not published, a regional breakdown, or a fact-check on a specific claim? That is exactly the kind of request this project exists to answer. Write to [email protected]. If you spot an error, the record is fixed and the change is listed on the corrections page.